Forged Alliances and Broken Dreams
by James Beil
Summary: When the Seraphim were defeated, the suffering of the people of the galaxy did not end. For the UEF, it was a new period of dominance. For the Cybrans and Aeon, it was a new kind of pain-and they were not destined for an easier time soon.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

Requiem for a Dream

"It has been just a little over two years since the Seraphim were defeated on Earth. The combined forces of the Illuminate, Cybran Nation, and the UEF – notwithstanding the betrayal of General-Brigadier Fletcher – were responsible for the victory. The two key factors to remember before the start of the war are these," continued Sarah. "First: The Trifaction Pact forced the alliance between the three factions after the Black Sun Omnicide. Second: The influence of Princess Burke, nominal leader of the Illuminate against the traitor faction siding with the Seraphim, was decisive. Not only did it rally a large force but she personally shut the Rift on Earth through means unknown." A bell rang, inside the college. The large white lecture theatre now had an atmosphere of expectant, impatient annoyance.

"In the next lecture, we will discuss the issues from the Black Sun Genocide and its' consequences. Now go on, go." The students didn't need telling twice-they were out faster than a UEF at a war crimes trial. Sarah made no secret of her utter loathing of the UEF, not only for what they had done to the Cybrans when the Infinite War still raged, but their shocking methods of bringing it to an end-not to mention some of the disgusting behaviour in those Cybran Nodes which remained, ruled by UEF governors. Still, peace was better than war at any rate-and more importantly, it was impossible for the Cybrans to win a conflict with the UEF without an alliance with the Aeon, and that was less than likely-almost impossible. Blowing a strand of brown hair from her red eyes, Sarah sunk into the chair at the front of the lecture theatre, letting the black leather envelop her as she called up her HUD.

The red interlacing and yellow lights all merged together, out from the back of her vision to the front where it replaced all those things before her. They were still visible, and in focus, but distant somehow, further away-and they mattered less. Only a disinterested arm exploring her computer for an uplink port roused her from her otherwise blissful machine-existence. Her right leg sung in a harmony of gears, whirring in a high pitch as her limbs dangled around the seat. Pulling back the fringe from the front of her head, Sarah fumbled with the uplink lead to find the port on her head, sinking a wire in slowly, letting the change come over her smoothly. Packet after packet of data, net-mails and events flowed like a river into her mind, the dance of electrons around her body lighting up bright, almost crimson wire-thin lines across her body, some on the left side of her head near the uplink port, others along her arms and some hidden by a white shirt and black tie, tight-fitting black jeans hiding her legs. The right leg, to be exact, was not covered but rather completely open to the elements, Sarah feeling no need to protect metal from the elements.

She did not feel cold when the wind blew against it, but negative feedback reports, and the sun did not warm it but trigger a photovoltaic power report. It was an elegantly designed piece, with metal scales pointing upwards in a tear-shape covering the naturally-shaped limb, hiding the thin grey pipes that were shaped, simulating realistic muscle with the added benefit of being far, far better than and human muscular fibres. The foot was like a bird's, three pointed prongs elevating exactly four point seven centimetres from the ground, and frankly Sarah was proud of it. Much like the red lines that marked half her face, or the various plugs and sockets leaking from her skin, or the tattoo on front of her left shoulder showing in black the three-pronged triangle of the Nation. They marked her out, and when it came each month for the UEF patrols to come into her allocated home and search her allocated things for anything untoward, she would make no attempt to hide anything. She was a Cybran, good and proud, and had no shame in showing it to her _'elected superiors'_.

The hypocrisy of the UEF would have been funny if she were not trapped in the totalitarian scheme. Most Cybrans were employed as slave computers by the UEF military, and those outside of the military were usually enslaved. Sarah was still technically bonded to the Dean, but as Mr. Daniels ensured that his staff and students all had access to what little liberty remained in the new world order, she considered herself as free as the next man. _What was it we fought for? What did they all die for? How could they lie to the Doctor in the negotiation chamber all this time?_ When the negotiation after the war had finished, the UEF immediately cancelled the agreement and sent the armed forces to destroy any remaining illusions of liberty. They had _used _their allies to take the brunt of the Seraphim, and then placed themselves handily at the head of the galaxy, with unelected rulers taxing without representation and showing that no matter how bad the omnicidal Seraphim could ever be, mankind could always go at least one better.

The little computer built into her desk sung as Sarah reached with her thoughts, seeking out the net mails for the day, some from inside the college and some from further away, quieter but in no way harder to hear. It puzzled her how people could just read data on a screen, watch numbers tick by without being one with them, having no impression of what they sounded or felt like, no intuition of their warmth or idea of the taste, sound, smell, texture of the messages they received. Perhaps they were better off in one way-Sarah had seen the awful effect of biometric malware. When a node on Hellespont had rebelled, the UEF sent in a wave of programs to destroy the minds of the occupants.

Sent in as one of the cleaners, Sarah had wiped away bodies and seen large men reduced to bundles of twitching flesh, begging for the end if they were still sane and rocking back and forth, dribbling or singing songs to themselves if their minds had totally broken. One memory in particular stuck out, a harsh reminder of the monstrous regime she lived under. Sarah had been sent into a house to check for any occupants while the UEF infantry executed the survivors, and found, locked away in a wooden cupboard, a small child, no older than six. His parents, she assumed, had put him in there to keep him away from the machines and themselves as they deteriorated into mindlessness. The bright-eyed child had looked at Sarah as a saviour, and she had cried as she picked up the child and held him in her arms, down the stairs and onto the street. He had smiled at her with thick lips and an unsuspecting look as the infantry had lined him up, and even after they had splattered his brains over a wall, something about his face said to Sarah, _'Hello. You just killed me.'_ She would never forgive herself-or them.

As her mind ticked over the past, a net-mail from the present popped up with impertinent authority. The subject line was _Tonight._ Opening the file without a movement, the red HUD filling her vision, she read. _Sarah, are we still up tonight? The whole humanities faculty is going so far, and I needn't remind you that if you come it'll be the biggest unofficial get-together the college has had. Besides, eventually you'll have to get along with these people-you can't stay alone in that lecture theatre for your whole life._

_-Richard_

Richard was a nice man, tall, dark-skinned, short curly hair topping his head-quite Sarah's opposite. While she was brooding and dark, he was a constant source of fun and laughs, and had so far been the only person bar the dean she had properly got along with or even spoke to. Moving planet had been hard, leaving her node and the minds of everyone else to live in a planet dominated by an Aeon population. The total population of Nibelheim was seven point six billion, and forty seven percent of those were Aeon. Another forty five percent were UEF, and the remaining eight percent were Cybran, mostly in slave labour. There were only five Cybrans in a class of over two hundred for Sarah, and that was one class in a day filled with six of them. No, it had not been easy at all.

Searching everything new had taken only three minutes, and after reading a little on Operation: Mopup Sarah checked her internal timer. It was a few minutes past three in the afternoon, and Richard would be wondering where she was soon. Standing up from the chair, she spoke a silent goodbye to all the packets of data as she removed the uplink cable, winding it back into it's self-contained case and popping the little black oblong into her back pocket. Her metal leg whistled as she stepped out of the hall, up the stairs with a leather jacket in hand. Swinging it over herself and onto her arms, Sarah lowered the tie a little, to look at least a bit casual. Richard being such a strange combination of both UEF and _nice _was a difficult concept and Sarah had calculated that there was a distinct positive correlation between 'casual' and 'agreeable'. The loose jacket held her tightly as she flicked off the lights by the door, stepping into the corridor and towards the trans-park. She was a few halls away, or so she thought, when behind a door appeared Richard, almost a full two feet above her at six feet eight. His ever-present smile was a sort of beacon as she looked down a little, an unconcious reaction.

"Sarah, you've been wandering around for about ten minutes. I saw you leave the lecture theatre on the shared-CCTV, if you're wondering. Come on, if I leave you here we'll never get down to Solace." He held open the door with a large hand as she moved past him, keeping pace and following his instructions. His big strides were hard to keep up with, and her small legs could only do so much. By the time they arrived in the near-empty trans-park, sun beaming down a cool twenty-three point four degree heat, she was more than glad of the small blue hover car, round edges and gull-wing doors speaking to her as a machine in a way that she suspected Richard just couldn't grasp. Stepping into the cream coloured synthetic-leather interior, Sarah had to remind herself not to try and interface with the vehicle. Frankly, it was a surprise she was in this-no Cybrans were allowed vehicles outside supervision, and everyone from her quarter was forced onto buses to the various districts by armed guards every morning. Travelling around the jungle of tall, spire-like buildings, so ordinary and square with almost no corners at all was a new experience, and the first time she had been forced onto the bus the flying vehicles managed to get her to lose her lunch over the side, down onto the unlit planet surface where she assumed nobody lived.

The traffic was thin, and before long, in a wordless journey made no more agreeable by her casual tie, the car arrived at a small balcony attached to a skyscraper covered in neon lights. Stepping out as the hissing gull doors opened, Sarah had only so much as put her bird-foot leg onto the ground when a police officer blew his whistle, transmitting an aggressive program that gave a sharp negative feedback loop into the hearing centre of the brain. Sarah fell out altogether, clapping her hands to the side of her head, still unused to the pain after a year and a half of hearing it. Richard stepped out as well, his deckshoes coming down with some force, grey t-shirt with a neat collar and a pair of jeans holding him. He wore an expression of malice as the officer put the whistle away, grabbing Sarah by the arms and pulling her up. As he patted her down with his hands, thin digits feeling her clothes for any sign of something untoward, the deep-voiced geologist spoke. "Excuse me, officer, but is there any problem?" His partner, a thoroughly average man with blue eyes, responded.

"The problem, sir, is that you have brought a Cybran into a restricted area and as such we have to search it." His partner nodded to him. "Very well, you two have access, but you are responsible for any actions this Cybran takes against the law. Enjoy your night." He turned and the pair returned to a small shed, watching for any more vehicles.

Sarah brushed herself down, stepping around the vehicle and following Richard into a bar, at the head of which was a large, pink-neon sign saying 'Solace'. "Sorry," said Richard, breaking the ice. "I should have expected something like that. The least they could of done was said 'she'."

"Really, Richard, I'm quite used to it," lied Sarah. Being manhandled and occasionally having a policeman grab a breast was never a thing she would get used to.

"It shouldn't happen, you're with me. Anyway, come in. Time to get rather drunk." Sarah smiled as she stepped into the bar, filled with music and laughter, a hand coming up to greet them from a group of seats arranged in a three-quarters circle into the wall and around a table, the rest of the humanities faculty at Oxbridge College greeting Richard and the newcomer. She wasn't bothered that it was physically impossible for her to get drunk-for the first time in twenty-eight years, she was about to have fun with friends in a bar.

_A first time for everything, Sarah, a first time for everything._


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Tick Tock

Spearing through space, two massive silver ships lined with pinstripes of lime green moved silently through the cosmic void. They had just left a Quantum gate and were hovering over an entirely insignificant blue-green planet populated by the UEF. The skies above Nibelheim were filled with the wreckage of the planetary orbital protection system, and inside one of the ships was a teleport hangar filled with ten ACU's. Inside one of the heads of the ACU's, huge metal giants, was a certain member of the Aeon Illuminate.

"Everybody have their orders?" Rhiza spoke into the headset, laid back in the chair, letting green light flow over her. She didn't like this, not one bit, but until the Princess returned or her successor appeared this was what they would have to do. It was a long time since she had last suggested cleansing a planet like this, and after what the Seraphim had done she was almost happy to accept her position underneath the UEF. It was their treatment of the Cybrans, forcing the Doctor out again that tipped her over into the revolutionary movement, and secretly she hoped that this would be over quickly.

The massive shunt she felt told her that she was about to be released from the clamps; a technician over the headset informed her that the Gate was free for entry. Pressing a button with a lithe, thin finger, Rhiza set the ACU into motion, the heavy machine whirring as the legs moved forward, the giant stepping into the shifting blue pool. A queasy feeling came over Rhiza before a familiar falling sensation wiped over her. The fear came and went, and the interior maps loaded up, analysing her surroundings. The front camera display showed the typical blackened ground, and as the dust cleared green fields around a massive city in the distance came to the fore. Firing up her sensors, Rhiza heard the distinctive beep of aggressive force detection.

Swinging the torso around, Rhiza's camera fixed onto a group of particularly unfortunate vehicles. Judging by their size, they were not particularly dangerous, and the first shot she fired, the recoil of the blast shuddering through her ACU, resulted in two piles of wreckage. Two more shots lead to three more bits of wreckage and a hopefully unalarmed planet. Delathing the wrecks with her reclamation beam, Rhiza spoke into the her headset. "Can anyone report on the stealth generators?"

"This is Command," responded Avatar Helios, the man in charge of the plan overall. "The stealth bots should be coming in now." A flash and an energy spike was followed by the arrival of a large tank, with a smooth flow of shape, like a shell, surrounding Rhiza with a shimmering field, a haze that looked no more worrying than a sign of a hot day. Perfect.

She loaded up a series of nanolathe patterns and got to work-this planet wasn't going to cleanse itself.

When most people wake from a particularly good night, their first question is 'who is the person in the bed with me?' or rather 'why am I in such pain, please God let me die.' Sarah was of a different ilk and instead ran a damage report test. The subconscious bleeping ended with a message on her HUD, as she laid naked in bed, hidden by a sheet and totally refusing to get up.

RESULT: DAMDIOG  
>DEHYDRATION: 21%<p>

STOMACH CONTENTS: MINIMAL

ESTIMATED PAIN SCALE: 3.4  
>RECOMMENDED COURSE OF ACTION: REMOVAL OF TOXINS AND REHYDRATION.<p>

RECOMMENDED SLEEP LEVEL: TWELVE HOURS

DAMDIOG/KILLPROCESS

"Urgh." This was probably the most sensible thing she could possibly have said at the time. The levels of darkness in the room lead her to believe that it was somewhere before sunrise, and her internal clock concurred, although she was having difficulty clearing out each process from another. They were all mixed together like a maelstrom into one very painful headache. Clearly, last night she had proved that Cybrans could, after all, get drunk-if not, there was no bloody justice since she was having a truly spectacular hangover. A clock by her bedside, an old wooden thing with an old-fashioned quartz timepiece, was being very annoying and very loud indeed, some might even say impertinent, but Sarah was not quite ready to use such big words this early in the morning.

Each tick, followed by a tock, followed in it's own turn by another tock, was like a hammer hitting Sarah through the side of her head. An exploring arm sought some way of getting rid of the noise, but the assistance of gravity sent it to the floor where the battery fell out, bringing some much-preferred silence to the room. "Close HUD." Sarah spoke her thoughts, as the deep colours vanished from her sight and the bright red lights criss-crossing the left side of her face faded out and were replaced with the simple black thin wires that held the now-gone light.

"BARK." An electronic voice came from outside the door, forced open with a protruding metal instrument. In the hallway floated a small drone, about a foot from the floor, circular with red dot-lights and a matrix of wires over a black metallic body. A small tube at the front of the circle lit red as the drone spoke again. "BARK." The monotone voice was a very poor simulation of a dog, but the small drone was always a welcome companion. Sarah rolled onto her side and opened her eyes to see the little machine in the dim light, and couldn't help but smiling. No matter how bad things could get, DOM, or 'Drone Operated (Engineering) Machine' was always there with a line of bad code or a funny series of digits.

He was a reminder of the old days, after being captured by UEF slavers. Digitally chained to a central computer controlled by an overseer, she had used instruments like DOM to rebuild tanks or to repair structures when official engineers were missing, or when a menial job that the UEF deemed as beneath them needed doing. When DOM had finally failed and crashed two years ago, only Sarah had been brave enough to attempt a repair; the program she eventually came up with was nothing like the program DOM had been created with, but he was definitely an enjoyable pet. "Come on, DOM. Onto the bed." If she was going to have a lie in there was noone she'd rather have it with.

Richard was feeling rather groggy, mostly because he had spent most of the previous night drinking very heavily and had lost most of whatever he'd eaten that day. He was already two hours awake when Sarah ordered DOM into her bed, and the lights in his small apartment had been glaring for three. He held a ballpoint pen in his hand, writing in his diary. Most people would have been using a pad for this, but he much preferred to use an old-fashioned book-his apartment was full of such old-fashioned things. A grandfather clock, wood furniture, paintings, magazines, books from centuries gone by, the progress of years leaving them unharmed thanks to his ministrations.

Last night had been fun, Richard definitely remembered that. He hadn't expected Sarah to be so much fun-and if the lights went out, they could always use her as an emergency source-watching someone lose their inhibitions and show off with a light display was one of the things he always wanted a camera for-unfortunately, nobody had thought to record it and as such it would be gone forever, or maybe just until next Friday when he intended to have the same party. Richard had always been one of those people; a party animal, a creature of fun who thrived on making others happy. At thirty, he was showing none of the signs of slowing down, and even though he could be expected to live to about two hundred he never felt he had enough time to have fun.

These dark mornings didn't help either. He had heard of some planets where the cities were roofed with artificial skies that always shone with the sun, pumping energy-inducing substances into the air to keep people working twenty-four seven. If Richard lived on one of those planets, he'd never get anything done; he'd spent all his time either drunk, post-drunk, or getting ready to be drunk. It wasn't as though he was some kind of alcoholic, far from it. Richard had seen his father drink himself into an early grave at just fifty five, and the idea that maybe all the parties were going to kill him was scary indeed.

The fact he remembered last night told Richard that he hadn't gone overboard, something of a relief. Standing up from the straw-padded chair he leant against the table, yawning, one arm raised in the air. There was a knock at the door, and he moved over, through a corridor and past the grandfather clock in the hallway to open the door, grasping the shining brass knob and pulling it open. A robot stood in the doorway, built like a square column with grey and blue colouring. It forced some envelopes out of a slot into his hand, and then trundled away on little grey tracks at the bottom of the columnar structure.

Richard closed the door, flicking through the letters. Mostly they were bills, except for one piece of junk mail that offered 'a larger girth for a smaller price than any other company'. That one went straight in the bin. Some quarters of the city had automatic mail delivery, but for some reason most of the people here didn't really like the impersonal touch of a tube delivering all of their mail. The mailbot's rounds were a sign that the day had begun, and that the rest of the business of the day could start. Wandering back into his front room, Richard sat in an old sofa with deep red, almost burgundy upholstery and flicked through the bills with the ball-point, filling in boxes and struggling to cling on to life, being bored to death by black and white text.

As he finished the last signature, he reached for the remote control and turned on the television, mounted on the wall with steel clips, into the old wallpapered brick-and-plaster wall. The first channel that came up was the official UEF news feed-a rather polite-looking woman behind a perfectly ordinary desk speaking in a completely unexciting voice. "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Nibelheim UEF. This morning, we..." She paused, and placed a hand to her ear, trying to listen to the voice in the earpiece so subtly hidden. "This is an official UEF Military Announcement. An energy spike indicating landing enemy forces has been detected outside the limits of Union City. All channels have been commandeered for military traffic only. Will all Non-UEF citizens please proceed to security centres immediately to prevent martial law enforcement. All UEF citizens please report to an evacuation station."

"Fuck."

As Richard swore, many miles away, another had the exact same sentiment. A young commander had just been informed that his duty of 'defend the sector' was now changed to 'defend the sector from Crusader Rhiza.' Dekker, from a family of Dutch explorers who colonised entire planets in the Imperial days, was a dark-haired young man with a small figure, little stature, and unimpressive airs. He sat in the ACU, watching his map of the sector as he issued orders to the engineers he had been issued. While he nanolathed factories from thin air, the engineers were constructing a veritable wall of turrets around the city, blocking the entire south-west entrance from any attacker. Whether or not his comrades would be so effective was another matter, however, as he turned the ACU around. Typing in a few commands with a spare hand, he called up the nanolathe pattern for Mass Extractor Type 3, a wire-frame model appearing on a blue screen inside the dark coffin the ACU formed around him.

This was his first combat, and he secretly hoped that it might just blow over or go around him; he had no intention of dying, and he knew full well what might happen if the Aeon captured him; he had been told in his military classes that the Aeon were fanatical monsters, purifying their prisoners with 'holy' catechisms and flagellation. Swarms of tanks moved in well-regimented blocks towards suspected Aeon locations, while Dekker requested permission to use Condition 3 nanolathe patterns. The reply came quickly and was thoroughly unrepeatable-Dekker's impression was that the officer in charge wanted the planet protected without attention to protocol.

Reports kept coming in, of one ACU spotted after another. By his count, there were over ten of the bastards flooding in, and the terrible thought at the back of his mind was that it was always possible that there were more. During the Seraphim War and the Infinite War, by all accounts there was usually only one battle on a planet, with only one or two-maybe three, at the most-Commanders on-scene. A few cases had occurred when additional Commanders had dropped in during a crisis point and frequently turned the battle, but an attack on this scale was unprecedented. Cold sweat was ruining the inside of Dekker's ACU, and his blue eyes darted from one point to another, trying to examine the immediate surroundings, nanolathe statuses, and the overall map all at the same time.

All the simulations had been far easier-they hadn't simulated the sick feeling at the bottom of his stomach he felt when a combat group failed and stopped responding, or the blind terror of hearing the frenzied communications between fellows and commanders, or the occasional leak of civilian traffic into military bands, emergency broadcasts and the instructions of leaving spacecraft filled with evacuees. Dekker's nanolathe structure shifted into Condition4 status, beams forming the wireframes of Fatboy construction vehicles. Shifting open a programming plane with his free left hand inside the cool blue cockpit, Dekker shifted decision-making processes down to his Condition3 engineers, allowing him a few more minutes to ponder the strategic situation. The crescent-shaped line of his sector was holding, with each regiment sent in making a little bulge here or there. _Not bad, Jensen, not bad. _

Rhiza, at the other end of the field, was less than pleased. Her attacks were being pushed away, and the UEF commander was operating a successful form of the 'Leapfrog Wall' plan-every attack gained territory, held it with constructed hardpoints, and then launched another attack. At this rate, she would have exactly fourteen minutes before she was forced to recall or be caught in the destruction of her own base. The ships overhead were busy intercepting refugee craft and capturing the occupants to do anything useful on the ground, and the two sectors to her sides were degenerating into almost trench-like battles of attrition. _Ah, attrition, our old friend. _Perhaps this was to be the way of things to come-yet more battles of attrition, the horror of young, fresh Acolytes sent into battle, practically boys and girls, sent to die in nuclear explosions, dead before their time by centuries.

The buzzing sound in her earpeice broke the normal silence of Aeon battle. "Crusader Rhiza, recall. We've got someone to sub in your position-you're done here." The Avatar's unerring voice was not one most would argue with.

"Avatar, I-" Rhiza was not 'most people'.

"Crusader Rhiza, recall immediately. There is no reason for you to stay here." She sighed, pulling open the security case over the bright red 'recall' button. Reluctantly, she depressed the key and felt the teleporter fire. _This had better have a damn good reason._

_Not again. Please, not again. _Sarah was bent in a chair, hands over her heads trying to drown out the shells. While UEF transports evacuated their citizens, the rest were stuffed into poorly-lit shelters like this, waiting for whatever was outside to come crashing in. Even the guards were starting to disappear; the UEF were either in running street battles with human combat, or they were abandoning the planet altogether. The shelter was a concrete semi-cylinder, with a bench on each wall and tiny lights lining the roof of the interior. There were mostly green lights from the glowing tattoos of the Aeon, mixing into yellow where the green collided with the red lights of the Cybrans. One very unusual grouping was a married couple, no older than thirty, an Aeon and Cybran holding each other close, silent with their eyes closed. At any moment, they expected the roof to collapse and for all the world to vanish.

The steady drumming of the shells collapsing outside was a handy reminder that Sarah was, after all, still alive. There was no way that she would dream up a situation like this if she was dead-and if she was dead Sarah wouldn't be wondering where Richard was. Chances were, he was either dead or evacuated by now. The metal bulkhead door shifted and groaned, scraping the floor as it opened. In the doorway stood a small figure, not five foot in all, a child. In the dim light it was hard to tell whether it was a boy or a girl, and the lack of parents or any sort of guardian left a terrible impression on Sarah-no parent would leave their child at a time like this, and there was only one conclusion she could draw.

"Quickly, get in, close the door!" Sarah snapped, standing up and moving over to the child. Closer, she could see that it was in fact a small boy, possibly no older than five years. He flinched back at her approach, but reassuring him that she would not eat him could happen after the door between them and a military attack was closed. Wrapping her fingers around the boy's wrist, she heaved the great metal door closed, and the auto-valves hissed as gas left the hinges, vacuum-shutting the door until the next person from outside came along.

Half-dragging the child back to her place on the bench, she pushed him onto the metal plane and knelt down, looking him in the eyes. There was fear, illuminated by the red glow of Sarah's head. "You're safe here. I'll look after you."

The child petulantly spat, "I want my father." _Father, _wondered Sarah. _What five-year old calls their father 'father'? _

"Where is he?" Sarah was impatient. Children were loud, confusing, troublesome creatures, and she refused to go into teaching anything but after-school year college courses for that exact reason.

"He's out there now, killing the Aeon and the chipheads." _Wonderful. Nice to see that galactic peace has such a well-trained future._ Sarah looked down, trying to think of something to say that wasn't fired by the newfound rage at the term-Fletcher had used it before he was killed, and she could only associate it with the kind of racist this child would grow up to be.

"I need you to be quiet, okay? Can you do that?" Sarah didn't stick around for the answer, instead moving down the structure, pacing away the anger, a great wave brought by a single word from the mouth of a child. Her knuckles were white, fists clenched and arms crossed as she moved, the whistling gears of her leg singing a little tune every time they fell upon the ground.

It was only after she had gone down the hall completely twice, treading the cold concrete, that someone stood up and stopped her. It was a girl, left eye replaced with an optical implant, a red lens staring into her and showing a reflection, little glowing wires criss-crossing their way across the implant and the side of her face, into an uplink port just below her hairline, tied back in a neat blond ponytail. There was youth in that face, and a subtle smile that defied the situation at hand. Her other blue eye twinkled as she spoke, hands on Sarah's shoulders. "I think we would all appreciate it very much indeed if you would sit down and calm down. There's no need for you to get yourself into a rage." Sarah sighed-she was right, and as much as she wanted to punch a wall and then drop-kick the little brat down the end near the door, it wouldn't do any good.

She allowed herself to be guided down onto the bench again, and the woman sat down next to her, hand still on her shoulder. "I think I know what you need. Got an uplink lead?" Sarah searched her pockets, sure there was one somewhere. She stopped her, a hand raised. "Don't worry, we'll use mine, I'll feel safer about it. No offence, but I don't know where anyone else's has been, and getting dirt out of implants is like hell." Her voice was quiet, familiar, reassuring-like a grandmother. Sarah leant back as she removed from a pocket on her brown leather jacket a neon-pink cord, pulling it out from the case. _Well, she's clearly not a teacher. _Perhaps it was a sign of being dull and old that Sarah refused to use any wire that wasn't properly wire-coloured, either brown or black, or maybe just blue in an extreme case-but neon pink? Compared to the dim light and shadow of the bunker, it was a welcome change of colour. Lying back with her eyes closed, she felt a hand on her head, warm, and the small entry of the uplink cord, a protruding metal cylinder entering her skull and interfacing with her mind. "Now me." The woman plugged herself in, thin fingers slipping it in softly.

The meeting of minds was extraordinary. Exchanging data, thoughts, ideas without even thinking of it, completely giving over to another person-technically, it was still illegal under UEF law. Letting Cybrans directly interface with each other was, in their eyes, likely to encourage dangerous, revolutionary ideals, and was detrimental to the morale of the worlds in the Federation. Those 'revolutionary ideals' were certainly present in both of the minds linked together, the wave of facts coming all at once like a narcotic high. _This is one of your students, _Sarah reminded herself, and immediately the reply came.

_I don't think you'll be arrested if that's what your worried about. Some of the things you think are positively filthy, you know that? _

_You aren't exactly miles away from the mental gutter either, Ykaterina. _

_Urgh, I hate that name. It feels like I'm being told off. _The conversation flew at the speed of light, heating the wire as they learnt and felt everything in the brain of the other partner. It had been a long time since Sarah had done anything like this, and then it was only ever with her mother.

All sense of time slipped away, engrossed in Ykaterina as much as Ykaterina was engrossed with her teacher. The original inhibitions Sarah had considered about doing this with a student dropped away into a vortex of complete and total surrender. It was not pleasure, but the sensation was certainly not displeasure. Finding the words for it was impossible, and eventually Sarah gave up on it altogether, sinking backwards. She was being dominated by the young woman, being force-fed data, ones and zeroes piling into her skull and filling all of her consciousness. _We need to stop, miss. _Sarah was again asserting herself.

_I don't want to,_ replied Sarah, rather childishly. She was having too much fun to even think of stopping.

_No, I mean we need to. There is someone at the door. I'm pulling it out now. _The sinking feeling after the high came straight away, the hole left by the removal of the uplink lead feeling like a...well, a hole in the head. There was knocking as her senses reasserted themselves, and a voice. "We can't open this door, it's locked itself good and proper. Stand back, we're going to blow it off." A panicked crowd quickly formed, retreating from the door as far as they could, pushing into Sarah and those at the back into the wall or another person, stopping only just when danger started becoming an option for those pressed against the wall; like a pair of lungs, the crowd loosened a little.

There was a flash from the end of the bunker, and the door was not blown off but rather melted altogether. A green-suited soldier stepped through, and behind him through the hole left in the door was visible the legs of an Aeon war machine. The shelling stopped and once there was a suitable silence, awe and terror mixed into one, he began speaking in a deep, hypnotic voice. "Please form an orderly queue so we can identify you." The intructions were understood, and the officer took the name from the person at the front, looked at his data pad, pressed a button on the screen and simply said "Move along to your place of residence." The queue orderly moved forward inch by inch, until Sarah and Ykaterina gave their names and stepped out. Outside, there were almost no pedestrians, just people trying to get to wherever they lived as soon as possible-floating tanks the size of pine trees in the road acted as some encouragement, and squads of infantrymen picking their way past wreckage and craters gave a clear indication as to what had happened-especially to the father of that boy.

"So, where are you living?" asked Sarah. Ykaterina looked downhearted, and pointed toward a crater across the street.

"In what used to be a hostel. Now it's more of a...stain." Sarah felt a pang of sympathy.

"Don't worry, you're alive and that's what matters. Did you lose anything valuable?"

"Not really," replied Ykaterina. "All the important things are the photos, and I keep those in my wallet." A bulge in her back pocket showed where that was-and the jeans she wore showed a total disregard for the idea of a garment being 'too tight'.

"You could stay with me. Until they nanolathe a new one, obviously," offered Sarah. Ykaterina smiled and her eye twinkled while the lens moved in and out, a little like DOM's wagging laser mechanism.

"Thanks, I'd like that. Chances are your apartment is filthy, isn't it? Don't lie, I've seen inside your head. You can't keep anything tidy!" The pair laughed as though they were the most natural friends in the world.

"Come on then. The sun's starting to set and I don't like the idea of being out here before they fix the lights." As the pair walked, Sarah couldn't help but wonder why the Aeon were being so...nice. She had become used to being stopped and searched, having her details asked of her, being pushed around and ordered about by men and women in sky-blue uniforms, but these new soldiers weren't even asking for ID.

_Perhaps, _thought Sarah, _just perhaps they're here to stay. The Aeon wouldn't attack just one system at a time, surely? _As she closed the door of her apartment behind her and Ykaterina let out an excited 'Aww' at the sight of DOM, Sarah hoped that they were.

**If someone's reading, could they either give me a review or a PM? It's nice to have the encouragement.**

**-James  
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	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

New Morning

On a little planet called Victoria, a small man, well-dressed with a finely trimmed moustache looked from the top of a large hill, surrounded by trees. In the distance, a land bridge between two continents was peppered with black marks, and white and blue flashes forced him to blink. The last time he was here was in uniform, dictating a superhuman effort with twenty separate ACUs, some converted to operate undersea, winning the Final Battle of Seton's Clutch. It was already written down in the history books, and General Hall bore a subtle smile as the clear-up of the grounds carried on, as it had done for the last two years.

When the Seraphim had finally been forced off, Hall had preceded straight to Earth, for the final battle against them-and in the case of Fletcher, his own forces. The loss of Brigadier Fletcher was not a major problem-he had been unstable and after the incident it was found he had been conspiring against the Alliance. However, the loss of a UEF commander in the last battle of the Seraphim War created a martyr, and the image of the Cybran who had destroyed the arch rift was an inconvenient truth for the UEF. The officer concerned, a certain Natasha Lenin, disappeared along with Doctor Brackman after the signing of the Seraphim Dictate, formalizing the end of the Infinite War.

The idea of ACUs going missing and not coming back up again worried Hall, as did the unknown whereabouts of Brackman. If he could be anywhere, he would be anywhere; every Cybran planet had been searched and he had not been located. _How does a brain in a jar disappear? _The question had been asked both by Hall, leaders, the public, and anyone with a mind. At least Burke's vanishing act was clearly the end of her-even if the Aeon refused to acknowledge that she had actually died. Most of them stubbornly saw it as her personal apotheosis to the end of 'The Way', while most sensible UEF-born citizens thought nothing of it.

"Mister President," called a voice from behind the former General. "There's a report for you." He turned around. In the hand of a carapace-wearing soldier was an old-style document, a brown folder with paper inside. This was interception proof, and that suggested this was important. The red stamped notice 'TOP SECRET' confirmed his suspicions, and as he took it in hand he could feel the familiar sense of trepidation crawl up his hand. He flicked it open, eyes narrowing as he read.

UEFREPORT EYESONLY

AEON ILLUMINATE ATTACKS ON NIBELHEIM, SERAPHIM, PROTHEAN, CORE,

ARM, BAVARIA SYSTEMS

UEF MILITARY ASSETS EVACUATED

UEF CIVILIAN ASSETS EVACUATED

AEON, CYBRAN CIVILIANS IN SAFE POSITIONS PENDING AEON ACTIVITY

QUANTUM GATE NETWORKS AROUND SYSTEMS SHUT DOWN

SYSTEMS ASSUMED CAPTURED

LEADER OF AEON FORCES ASSUMED RHIZA KAEL, RHIZA KAEL POSITIVELY

IDENTIFIED IN FIELD  
>ESTIMATED CASUALTIES FIVE MILLION MANNED TROOPS<p>

TWENTY FOUR ACUS LOST

UEF MOBILIZATION UNDERWAY

Hall snapped the folder shut with a crack of his hand. It had finally happened, the revolution began. When he had taken charge after the Seraphim War, the UEF had been broken almost completely, and the lack of a stabilised central government caused the deference of power to local governments and the rise of the anti-foreign sentiment that dictated policy. Since all decisions were taken as a collective by the Senate of Governors, the racism at the bottom overpowered any sense of fairness Hall or anyone else tried to show.

Following that he could do the best by his old promises to Burke and the Doctor by staying at the top, Hall paid lip service to the Senate, while searching for a way out of the problem. Of course, to say this complicated things was an understatement of massive proportions. If he took no official action the governors of the neighbouring systems would conduct their own private wars, and if he acted it would be seen as the President, arguably the last public bastion of the idea that all men were created equal, betraying his principles and the people he had numbered as his allies only two years ago.

This required serious thought. The President called for transport back to his home, a set of quarters in the main military base inside Victoria City, renamed after the end of the war to celebrate UEF might. It was completely free from any sort of free foreign presence; every symbiont in the city was linked to a mainframe of some sort, or doing manual labour for the UEF citizens. Not a single Aeon was to be found within the city limits, excluding shanty towns on the roads into Victoria City. The adapted Stinger was not a smooth ride, nor was it well-lit, but it had the advantage of being both fast and defensible. It dusted off and landed with the assured ease of a machine, and the quiet hum of the engines died as Hall stepped onto the landing pad with the customary greeting of two hurrying soldiers rushing him underneath the roof.

It was over ten minutes of nannying and fussing about before Hall was allowed to retire to his room. It was simple, just a bunk, a desk, a computer and a few items of stationery. He had rooms like this, issued to order, on every planet in every system in the Federation-even on Earth. He had no intention of breaking with his past as the Alliance leader, even if the Alliance had been burnt down and cast aside. The military regimen he imposed upon himself, even in what he wore, was a vital constant in a galaxy he increasingly felt was less and less under his control. Instead of a suit, he wore the old dress uniform-it still smelt of command, of hours spent leaning over a table, watching results come in and directing the efforts and deciding the lives of billions of people.

He sat by the chair, old knees twinging ever so slightly as he eased into the metal seat, pulling a fountain pen from his breast pocket. Dragging a piece of paper over to himself, with the folder beside himself on the table. Digging through the contents, he took little notes here and there, formulating a plan. It had been a very long time since the blue-eyed General had sat down like this and calculated, drawing little arrows or putting circles around important facts. This was, for a little time, General Hall back in his own, natural element-and a small warmth grew inside him as he reached for another sheet of that familiar, crisp, white paper.

_Darkness, then a pinprick of light. More, then sounds like machines, and then pain. _Richard stirred, lying down in...he wasn't sure where. He remembered sirens, being evacuated and stuffed onto a little ship, fired into space amidst shelling and explosions, and then nothing. There was a green fuzzy light in the slit between his eyelids, widening quickly. He blinked twice, waiting for the world to sharpen. He was definitely lying down, in a dark room, a hemisphere of grey with a running green accent, causing the light that stung his eyes. He was unable to move his arms or legs, tied down by metal straps that sprung from either side of the slab he was laid upon.

His neck was free, and darting his head from side to side, blinking away tears brought on by the intense light, Richard saw more of these slabs, perhaps ten to each side of him, each with a person tied down onto it. A hissing sound met his ears and a series of footsteps came closer. "Excuse me, could you please look at me?" Richard moved his neck and looked. There was a silhouette above him, but in front of the light it was hard to tell what he or she was. "Can you hear me?" There was a pause, Richard trying to work out what the soft, quiet voice was saying over the constant humming.

"Yes, I can...where am I?"

"Try to relax," advised the figure. "You are quiet safe." The figure paused before answering the question properly. "You are in Ward F of the hospital deck of the ISS _Rhianna_. I am Nurse Ethos Hellenika, and I need to ask you some questions."

Richard replied dryly, "I'm hardly in a position to run away."

Ethos ignored Richard's attempt at wit, flicking through a clipboard. "What is your name, age, home system and citizenship?"

Richard groaned before replying. "Urgh...Richard Daniel Makombe, 29, New Uganda, UEF Citizen." Ethos ticked a few boxes, and lowered the clipboard. She reached up and lowered a keypad from the ceiling, pressing a few buttons. The light softened, and a light green glow illuminated the room while the formerly black walls lit up, revealing shining silver, making the room look far bigger. Ethos, revealed in the light, was a very short woman indeed, no more than five feet tall. She had brilliant green eyes and white hair, cut short and bleached beyond even platinum blond-it was as white as snow.

Just as he saw her, she moved along to the next person. "Richard, somebody will be along in a few minutes to let you go." It was not a confident-sounding voice, and even when an armoured officer pressed a button on the side of the metal slab and the metal strips containing Richard retracted. The officer spoke, hidden behind his helmet.

"You can either return to the planet's surface, or take one of your craft back to Earth." He had stated it so matter-of-factly that Richard had to wonder whether or not he was talking to an elaborately costumed Sarah, or maybe another Cybran. As he slid off the slab, he couldn't help but wonder what sort of planet would be left on the planet when he went down there. The Aeon attacking force would have performed a massive shelling, but on Nibelheim there were the bunkers-anyone could have survived in those things.

They would have nanolathed over any damage, but the problem was the people. The shelling might have driven everyone mad-what if Danny was sitting in a corner somewhere, humming something about the rain? What if Sarah had suffered...whatever passed for Cybran PTSD, and killed herself? Hell, what about the people the Aeon would bring in? While Richard could safely say he had nothing against the Aeon personally, this sort of attack would bring in all of the crazies who think ethnic cleansing is a good idea. Still, Richard was never one to over-think problems. There was nothing for him on any other planet, so it was to be Nibelheim he would stay on._ Now, how to I get back Planetside? _

Sarah woke with a jolt. She was in blind panic, gripped by terror. The corpses had walked-WALKED! They had shuffled and shambled and dragged her down, they had ripped her to pieces and left the individual bits to rot, torn up like vegetables in a blender. The night had been a hard one, and memories previously locked up in protected sectors had rushed to the forefront of her consciousness. She threw back the covers of her bed, tossing them to the floor. Her HUD told her that it was only zero-four-zero-three-thirty-five, and the darkness all around confirmed that.

Inside the room was herself, a quietly resting DOM, and sitting, cross-legged, in a chair on the other side of the bedroom was Ykaterina. "You sound like you've been through hell." She shone red in the darkness, facial circuits buzzing with electrons dancing across her nervous system. "Now being as you've stopped me getting any sleep at all by screaming all night, I think you owe me something of an explanation." _Screaming all night? _This was not something that she would forget easily-Sarah was mortified both by the residual terror of her night, and the embarrassment of keeping one of her students up like this. "Usually, I'm more familiar with making girls scream with my tongue. The last time I heard screeching like that was when I set fire to my sister's head twelve years ago." She stood up, and moved over to Sarah, sitting at her feet in the bed, Sarah's legs bent and wrapped in her arms.

Truth be told, Sarah didn't want to talk about what had followed her that night. She had locked the memories away in protected files for a reason. She had deleted all knowledge of the password for a reason, the same one, and she had no intention of discussing her dreams with someone who should have been asking her questions about the Aeon influence upon war poetry during the Infinite War, certainly nothing like what she was suggesting. "Ykaterina-"

"Please, just Kat," interrupted the young Belorussian.

"Ykaterina," pressed Sarah, "You are a student and I am a teacher. Strictly speaking, I am not even sure if you living with me is entirely legal under UEF law. I certainly have no intention of telling you personal details about my life, and I would rather not now what sort of reaction girls have to your tongue." Sarah finished her serious lecture, and Ykaterina just rolled her eyes.

"Alright, 'Ma'am'. I'll wait until you've had breakfast." She stood up, moved to the doorway, and stopped, one hand on the frame, turning back to the woman in the bed. "While we're on the subject, that leg is pretty damn sexy." Having fired her final cheeky remark, she stepped through the doorway and vanished into the darkness, the last remnants of the light from her circuits glowing and fading as she walked away.

"Great," muttered Sarah to herself. "I'm sharing my apartment with a student only just over half my age, who can't get any sleep because I'm keeping her up, and she thinks my leg is sexy." As her voice retreated into silence, she brought up a text panel on her HUD and made a note. _Find out whether Ykaterina meant flesh or metal leg. _Her muttering had woken up DOM, who began to glow and fired up his fans, flopping onto the bed and buzzing toward Sarah. The daft machine made a sort of mewing noise, one Sarah knew only too well. "Alright, DOM, you stupid creature. Let's find you a battery." She slid off the bed, and pressed the button at the base of her beside lamp with a limp slap.

She emerged some ten minutes later, in a white polo shirt and black jeans-she suddenly regretted having cut the whole for her leg in every single one of her pairs of trousers-wandering into the kitchen come living room, a fine example of pine and plastic, with a white sofa and a bar, behind which lay a refrigerator, oven, and all the necessities of a kitchen. Reaching up into a cupboard, she pulled on a brass knob and opened the door, grabbing a small, beaten-up cardboard box. It was black, with red and yellow brand icons on it, but the key was that inside were several batteries, and attached to each was a little black device which, through means not known to Sarah, recharged them over weeks. Every so often, DOM would get 'hungry' and request another battery, and as Sarah plucked one of the dark, box-like batteries from the box, DOM, now floating at waist height, crippled with the excitement a dog gets with a new toy or a bone, made a yapping sound. On his roof a port popped open, and a spring fired the old battery into Sarah's hand, quickly putting the hot metal down onto the counter.

The Cybran gently shoved the next battery in, and DOM whizzed off with a grateful beeping, off to go and analyse something fun. Sarah, however, did not have a fun job. She had decided that Ykaterina would have to leave-it was just too awkward, leaving her here, having her in the same apartment. She strode over, and, hands together in front of her, opened her mouth. There was a lack of any sort of verbiage, because no matter how much she willed it the words would not leave her mouth. Ykaterina was sat in the sofa, expectantly, and Sarah knew what she would say, how she would say it, and why-but the words would not leave her mouth. After what seemed an eternity, she gave an exasperated sound and the words finally came. "Fine, you can stay, but on three conditions. One, you sleep on the sofa and make no comment about how occasionally I may go mad during the night and scream blue murder. Two, you will pay some sort of rent and make no mention of me to your friends. Three," Sarah paused. A smirk crossed her face. "You are to make no attempt to seduce me into letting you fuck my brains out, no 'going out on a date' and certainly no corny lines." The smirk grew. "Unless they really are very good."

The weekend passed swiftly, and now being properly settled in Ykaterina was proving a useful house guest. Apart from paying a rent dutifully, she was also a stickler for tidiness that Sarah simply couldn't match, and the place had never looked cleaner. While Sarah had a terrible suspicion that she would come home to find Ykaterina cleaning in some sort of maid's outfit at some point, she was not going to stop her working. At the college, lessons continued quite as normally. UEF citizens were being returned to the planet not at a fantastic pace but certainly quickly. While Richard's absence from work was a worry, Sarah was now finding herself in a situation wherein she could walk down the street and the Aeon soldiers would not stop her and search her nether regions with a baton and a disrupter whistle.

On the third day, Sarah was waiting at the spaceport in the centre of the city. It was about twenty-zero, and a cold wind blew her trenchcoat about, which she attributed to being fairly high up. She had voluntarily stepped aboard a bus to this location, without duress, and she would leave when she damn well felt like. In the distant skies, a twinkling grew and a green dot became recognisable as the transport shuttles, repainted, that had been ferrying citizens back from the huge Aeon ships above down to the surface of the planet. A tannoy announced "Will all citizens please be advised that the last shuttle for tonight has just landed and will be leaving in ten minutes' time. Glory to the Princess." The phrase 'glory to the Princess' had become normal for Sarah now-all the officials used it to finish announcements and security officers often said it to passers-by.

Watching the craft land, the seed-shaped machine ejected four landing struts, a little bounce coming as it hit the landing pad. A gantry lifted down, and people began leaving, all UEF citizens from every walk of life, from bankers in fancy suits to workers who had kept their gloves and overalls on when they ran for the ships. They filed out, and in all of ten minutes, Richard had not arrived. On the first night Sarah had not checked, nor the second. It was only tonight, when he had not been there at work when so many others were, back to their normal life at the college, that Sarah began to worry. She had kept a vigil all night, for nought. Feeling defeated somehow, she looked down as she turned around, dug her hands into the pockets of her massive coat, and solemnly, alone, made her way back to the transit station.

"Where are you?"

**Just so that I know people are actually reading this stuff, I'd like one proper review before I post my next chapter. As a sidenote, I'm fairly sure that traditional, modern-day sexuality no longer exists in the Cybran Nation, due to their innate closeness with all other members anyway. Sarah herself might not like girls, but she likes complements. **


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